Apple's Dividend - Why All the Excitement?

So earlier this morning Apple announced a dividend. I don't understand the fuss.

A) It's simply what mature/big companies do. Perhaps Apple's culture and customers had a tough time accepting this? Perhaps it's part of what Tim Cook wants to do as CEO at Apple? Make Apple a bit more mature?

B) The dividend is very average. At $2.65 a quarter, that gives us a yield of 1.7%. It's good, but nothing stunning. By my calculations Walmart is at 2.4%. Microsoft is at 1.9%. GE is at 2.9%. It's higher than Cisco & Oracle, which started issuing dividends not so long ago (both were around 1 percent).

A Young Amy Poehler on Conan O'Brien

A came upon these videos of a young Amy Poehler performing as Andy Richter's little sister on Conan O'brien. I couldn't stop laughing, Poehler is great in these.

Infiniband - You Gotta Have Pretty Good Game

A long time ago I saw a t-shirt from an Infiniband company that said the following

"Infinband - Fast, Cheap, Easy"

my thought process when first reading this was:

• Fast - Yup, it's fast.  Definitely faster than ethernet.
• Cheap - Yeah, way cheaper than ethernet.
• Easy - Ummm, no, you gotta have pretty good game ... and a wingman would help.

Now, I'm sure there are some market analysts at Cisco, Intel, IDC, etc. that did some fancy market analysis to figure out why Infiniband did not grow at the rates people predicted.  My guess has always been that it was because Infiniband isn't easy.  It's just way too different than ethernet, leading many institutions to not bother with it because it wasn't worth the hassle of learning, retraining, coming up to speed, etc.

I sometimes like to think of the issue with an Infiniband expert trying to explain Infiniband to a knowledgeable ethernet user. 

Ethernet Guy: So I installed all the hardware, loaded the drivers, but nothing is working.
Infiniband Expert:  Did you run the subnet manager? The subnet manager sets up and routes the fabric.
Ethernet Guy: Is that an option on the switch?
Infiniband Expert: Maybe, it's a piece of software that may run on the switch or a server. 
Ethernet Guy: Where is it on my fabric?
Infiniband Guy: On your network, it's a daemon running on a server.
Ethernet Guy: Ugh, but server configuration is handled by a different group.

or

Ethernet Guy: What are GUIDs in Infiniband?
Infiniband Expert: The GUIDs in Infiniband are like MAC addresses.  They are NIC specific identifiers.
Ethernet Guy: Ok, then what's a LID.
Infinitude Expert: A LID is sort of like an IP address.  It's the software based identifier for a port.
Ethernet Guy: So why does my Infiniband NIC have a LID and an IP address?
Infiniband Expert: You get the IP address from IP over IB.  It's a separate driver.
Ethernet Guy: So I need to load 2 drivers for one NIC?
Infiniband Expert: Yup
Ethernet Guy: So how do I see the LID for my NIC.
Infiniband Expert: You can use one of many tools, like ibstat.
Ethernet Guy: Why isn't it in ifconfig?

I could go on and on, but the point is it's so different that the learning curve is quite steep.  There's new ways to debug problems, new ways to route, new advanced configuration, new tools to learn, etc.  For the majority of institutions, the performance gain of Infiniband must be immensely superior to justify the cost for retraining, transition, inefficiency, maintenance, etc.

How many institutions found Infiniband to be "immensely superior" for their needs?  It seems to be not many.  I can imagine this conversation happening in many companies:

Manager: Hey, Engineer can you take a look at this Infiniband thing.   The sales people say it's super fast for the price.
Engineer: Sure thing, I'll play with it.
<1 week later>
Manager: So how is Infiniband?
Engineer: I can't figure any of this out.

and that's the end of Infiniband at that company.

Intel acquires Qlogic's Infiniband Assets - End of Infiniband?

So today, it was announced that Intel had acquired Qlogic's Infiniband assets for $125M.  My immediate reaction was, "uh oh, is the age of Infiniband in HPC over?"

Why would this be the end of Infiniband?  Here's my analysis and thinking on the topic.

In 2005 there were five early players in the Infiniband market worth mentioning: Topspin, Voltaire, Mellanox, Pathscale, and Silverstorm.

• Topspin was acquired by Cisco in 2005 for $250M. Cisco shut down their Infiniband R&D in 2009.
• Silverstorm and Pathscale were acquired by Qlogic in 2006 for $60M and $109M respectively (total $169M). Pathscale's compilers were sold for undisclosed amounts (or atleast I can't find the number online). Given they are undisclosed numbers, its unlikely the numbers were big.  So Qlogic likely couldn't sell their Infiniband assets for even the price they paid for them.
• Mellanox acquired Voltaire in 2010 for $218M.

So that takes us to the beginning of 2011. What was once 5 major players (or 4 if you count the merged Silverstorm/Pathscale as 1) became 2. The growth of Infiniband as a data center solution to replace Ethernet did not appear to be happening.  Naturally, consolidation occurred.

So no worries yet for Infiniband, there were still 2 major players left.  Well lets look at the financials.

• Mellanox has been profitable for awhile.  Last year (2010) they profited $13M on $154M in sales.  Analysts say that Mellanox had huge sales this year at $258M.  Going off old income statements, $50-$60M of that is from Voltaire, so that's some decent growth.  Of course, a non-trivial portion of this profit is not from Infiniband, but from Mellanox's Ethernet sales.  How much?  Unfortunately I can't find breakdowns.
• I couldn't find breakdowns in revenue/profit for Qlogic, but given the sale of their Infiniband divisions was for $125M, it indicates it wasn't much (Qlogic had a market cap of $1.6B starting today).
• As far as I can tell from data sheets, Voltaire never had a single profitable year.

I'm not some fancy financial analyst, but what I derive from this is that the total profitability of Infiniband is somewhere on the order of $25-$50 million globally. It's enough for there to be businesses out there and enough for there to be a market, but it's not a lot.

So the big question is, why did Intel buy Qlogic's Infiniband assets?

1. Were they interested in the ~$5M profit that Qlogic's Infiniband assets could net them?  I doubt it.  (I derived the ballpark $5M because this article puts Mellanox as owning about 85% of the Infiniband market.)
2. Perhaps Intel thinks they can do some bundling to increase the profitability of Infiniband.  Hypothetically, put them on Intel motherboards.  It's certainly possible.  But how much gain can they really get for a market that appears to not be interested in Infiniband?  Turn the $5M into $20-$30M in a few years?  It seems hardly worth it for an Intel.
3. Intel thinks they can turn Infiniband around as a data center/HPC solution and make it far more popular.  If this were 2005, I would be willing to believe it.  I think the lack of wider adoption of Infiniband is a bit cemented.  Newer/better Ethernet solutions are now catching up too, so it's not the same market as 2005.
4. Support Infiniband as a community service.  With Mellanox having 85% of the market, there was a decent chance Qlogic's Infiniband could eventually sink.  Without a competitor and decent prices, the HPC community could buy less Intel chips.  There is a good argument for this, although I think the odds of this are low.  Intel could completely ignore the HPC community and they would still buy tons of their chips.  Perhaps less overall, but is it enough of a difference for Intel to do a $125M community service for them?
5. This is an aqhire move, designed to give Intel the talent necessary to make the HPC networking product they really want to make.  While it could be based on Infiniband, it's unlikely to be standard Infiniband or standardized as Infiniband. There are very few companies/groups out there that know how to make HPC networking equipment, and the Infiniband group at Qlogic is one of them.  They could have bought Cray, but they'd be buying a lot of software assets they probably weren't interested in

My gut tells me its #5 above.  As an additional argument for this point, in 2011  Intel hired away a ton of HPC talent including Chief Architect of Blue Gene from IBM.  Did they hire a whole bunch of these elite HPC executives and architects to help push commodity Intel chips and hardware like they have in the past?  I doubt it.

So how is this the end for Infiniband?  Well, if my guess above occurs, you'll only have Mellanox as the player in the Infiniband market.  While I have respect for Mellanox, I have a hard time believing they are going to care about standardizing their hardware or pushing changes to standards groups if they are the only ones manufacturing it.  Eventually, Infiniband would become synonymous with whatever Mellanox produces, and Infiniband itself will be gone.

Update (4/26/12):

Heh, from #5 above:

They could have bought Cray, but they'd be buying a lot of software assets they probably weren't interested in 

and what do ya know, Intel bought Cray's interconnect assets earlier this week.

With that acquisition, that's a lot of networking HPC expertise to be buying up and absorbing.  Perhaps this enhances my argument that Intel is gathering forces to create a new HPC interconnect technology?

One colleague suggested that Intel might be trying to have a "portfolio" of different products.  It's certainly possible that they are, but it doesn't seem like something they would want to do.  Having a portfolio of products is more up the alley of an HP or an IBM.  It'll be interesting to see what Intel does, but the full manifestation of this will probably not be seen for years.

Hiding on LinkedIn

I ran into an article today on BusinessInsider titled GET HIRED: What 6 Hot Tech Companies Want To See In Your LinkedIn Profile. There are other similar articles out there that discuss how to use LinkedIn effectively to find a job.

I used to use LinkedIn pretty heavily, subscribing to a lot of groups, following the messages, and answering some questions from time to time. My profile was pretty filled with info. I even used to add links to my blog and other relevant sites.

One day I gave up on LinkedIn. I quit every group that wasn't exclusive (for example, my research group from grad school is exclusive to alumni members). I removed everything from my profile except for previous employers and schools. I even generalized my job titles to remove keywords.

Why? Headhunters and recruiters were getting really annoying. I was getting atleast 1-2 e-mails and phone calls a day. If I got job postings that were atleast somewhat relevant to my skills, experience, and interests, I wouldn't mind. However, it appeared most head hunters simply spam job postings to as many people as they can. Headhunters/recruiters seemed to scour groups to find people to contact and would e-mail people based on specific keywords in their profile.

For example, my job title at one point was listed as "Linux System Software Engineer". What job postings would I get? I would get job postings for "System Administrator", "System Engineer", "Linux Field Engineer", etc. Basically anything that matched any keyword in my job title. When I was unsubscribing to groups, I realized that one of the groups was even started by a recruiter.

So, I now hide on LinkedIn, keeping a shell of a profile so only ex-coworkers and friends can find me.

SOPA/PIPA Blackout vs. EFF Blue Ribbon Campaign

When I was in highschool, a bill was passed in congress called the "Communications Decency Act". I don't remember all the details, but basically it required ISPs and websites to block "indecent" material from minors on the internet. Eventually the bill was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Before it the bill was defeated, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) organized a blue ribbon campaign, asking people to post a picture of a blue ribbon and to "darken" websites in protest. (Darken here meant just making the background of your website black instead of white.) I remember virtually every major player in the internet participated in this protest. I remember atleast Yahoo and Netscape.com did, and they were probably the two most visited websites in the US at the time.

While the blackout protest by Reddit and Wikipedia is on the extreme end, I would have expected most major players to protest SOPA/PIPA in a similar small way. For example, Google's protest with their black-box doodle was tasteful and simple. (It is interesting that Google only did this on Google.com. They chose not to do this on Youtube.) Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Ebay, Twitter, etc. could have done something very similar.

It got me thinking. Could it be the internet has changed so much, it's just hard to do something like this nowadays? Fifteen years ago a simple HTML color change was all that was necessary to change Yahoo's homepage. But nowadays, it might take a huge engineering undertaking. You have to make sure the change will appear correct on gajillions of browsers and mobile devices. Perhaps Google was able to protest only b/c they had a "doodle-change" option already engineered in place?

Cookie Monster's Comedic Depths

Sometime back, I was reading a chapter in a book (I think it was The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell) describing the comedic depth of the writers on Sesame Street. At first, I was a little surprised by the comments. How in the world is Sesame Street sophisticated comedy? The chapter describes how the writers of Sesame Street added a lot of humor into the show to make sure adults would like it too. Back when Sesame Street first came out, most families only had one TV, and it was believed that parents wouldn't let their kids watch Sesame Street if it wasn't entertaining for adults.

I had not seen an episode of Sesame Street since I was a child, but had to confirm the argument. Sure enough, now as an adult, I can see a lot of the subtle humor in Sesame Stret that I never would have seen before. Here are some hilarious ones I found for Cookie Monster.



Clearly, tons of parody of the Today Show. I love Cookie Monster's line of, "Where this guy come from?"



I don't think this last one is from Sesame Street, but I imagine the writers setup the interview responses and the lines are hilarious.



Cookie Monster also has a hilarious breaking of the 4th wall in the beginning of this video:



Here's a hilarious interview w/ NPR



And I can't forget about Cookie Monster's classic Stephen Colbert interview

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/174545/june-19-2008/cookie-monster